Getting Started with my Bitmain Antminer L3+ [draft]

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This weekend (September 22, 2017) I acquired a Bitmain Antminer L3+, billed as “World’s Most Powerful
Litecoin Miner”. It uses 288 ASIC chips to calculate hashes for the Scrypt algorithm at an average of 504MH/s - in other words, it’s fast enough and economical enough to mine certain cryptocurrencies at a profitable ROI. Possibly as much as 4x in one year.

With this kind of gear, time (and electricity), is literally money. So I wasted no time in getting it to work for me, selling the hashing power on the open market in pools of other miners looking to cash in on the ever-fluctuating exchange-driven values of various Scrypt-based AltCoins.

Markets

There are three markets I focused my energies on: Prohashing, NiceHash, and MiningRigRentals. They all share a common theme of trying to help mining hardware owners maximize the value of their available hashing power by selling it to the highest bidder. However, they all have signifigant differences in approach and usability. Let’s take a look at each along with their pros & cons…

Prohashing

Prohashing promotes itself as, “a profitable x11 and scrypt multipool that pays miners in any coin”. I found it to have excellent usability and the amount of information they provide on graphical dashboards both at the platform level and the user level made me feel like I really understood what was going on (once I learned what it all meant).

Pros

Excellent data visualization - I know what is going on in real time with both my machine and the overall market

Site Operator Transparency - this is something I place a high value on

Educational - combining the two items above, plus the site’s documentation, I feel like I’m learning something while using Prohashing - this is something I enjoy when I’m geeking out on new tech like this

Power Consumption in the dashboard - I’ll go in to more details about the value of this toward the end of the post, but this is a great feature to help better understand overall cost

From any coin, to any coin - great efficiency maximization - I can be fairly certain my machine is always working on the most profitable coins, but I can get paid out in whatever combination of coins I feel are valuable (or want to speculate on!) - this includes USD through a Coinbase integration

Cons

Disconnects & Downtime - This was less an issue yesterday, but before that I was having connecting stability issues, and this service had some downtime. They recently released an update that may have improved stability. Thankfully, the L3+ has a mechanism to specify three pools in total, so it can fall back to a secondary and tertiary service if the primary is unavailable.

How do I know I’m “[making] the most money possible”? Prohashing works with certain exchanges, but are some coins going for more on other exchanges? Would I be able to make more on NiceHash? I see people talking about going over to NiceHash when they feel the profitability on Prohashing is lower, which may just be mini-FUD, but I’ll need to do some of my own research to find out.

Draft ends here, outline continues below - email me chrisbusse@gmail.com if you’re interested in the rest of this post or have further input

NiceHash

xxx

Pros

Cons
-

MiningRigRentals

xxx

Pros

Cons
-

Cost of Operation

Fees

Market Fluctuation & Timing

Power

Noise

My Time

ROI: Inside of 90 days?

xxx

(ok, maybe 120 days…)

What I’ve excluded at the moment

Other pools

LTC mining specifically

Next Steps

Having looked closed at Prohashing first, I want to do a bit more market research, running these experiments:

24-48 hours hashing on NiceHash

24-48 hours listed on MRR with their proxy settings set

24-48 hours hashing on ProHashing focusing on a single coin (essentially mining that coin)